Changing the body color

[ESP47]

I'm looking to change the color of my Barracuda here within the next year so I'm trying to put together a plan to be able to get started on it.

I'm fixing the car up but I'm not doing a total restoration or anything. Basically just engine, brakes, rear end, paint and freshening up the interior. The car is fairly clean but it's white and I just don't like the white look on a fastback.

My question is, what's the easiest DIY way to go about a color change? Do you guys normally take the shell in to get blasted or just sand it yourself? From researching online, blasting the entire car can cost from $1k-2k. I don't necessarily care about the undercarriage or the paint underneath the carpet and all the trim being the same color so I don't know if that's necessary for me. I'm going to be driving it a lot and I don't want to worry about everything being perfect all the time. I just want to make sure the body, under the hood, trunk, door jambs and anything visible is going to look good with the new color.

Now I've never sprayed before but I heard that primer isn't a big deal since you have to sand it anyway. Plus you don't really need to create a booth type setting when spraying primer right?

So what are the steps here? Sand everything down, epoxy primer, body work, high build primer, block and then take to body shop to get color sprayed?

 

[bighammer]

Sounds to me like your first step would be to go see a paint shop before you do ANY sanding or priming of the car. I would definitely avoid doing it the way you are considering. A reputable body / paint shop basically won't touch a car that has been "sanded and primed, ready for paint" They will want to start over, sand off your work so they know that it has been done right.

Personally I like white cars! I'd leave it the same color!

How is the current paint? Any rust, dents, damage? If you are considering a repaint just to change color, it does not need to be taken down to bare metal if the white paint is in good shape. Your paint guy will advise you on this. If your white paint is fine, it just needs to be scuffed and then proceed to primer / sealer and paint.

I'm not a paint guy, just my experience. Good luck with your project.

 

[ESP47]

Thanks for your response. The car is decent but needs it's fair share of body work. It's not rusty but there's a fairly large dent on the bottom of one of the fenders that I might not be able to fix. Every other panel has dings, creases and/or high spots. If worse comes to worse I'll have to weld in a patch panel for the fender because full fenders are ridiculously expensive to buy.

I like white cars too but my Duster is already white and my girlfriends Valiant is white. I want the Barracuda to be different. I've heard that body shops won't touch it if you've done the body work but I think I'd rather go the route of just having them spray it without a warranty if they'd do that. If I let a shop do all the body work, I'm going to end up spending an insane amount of money on it and that's not in the cards.

 

[Oldmanmopar]

There is a product called Jam-it used to paint jams without sanding. Check your local auto body supply store. There are also others as bulldog and sems. I have used them and they work if you also use a cleaner before hand.

 

[Abodybomber]

Pictures would help immensely, for a actual honest assessment. Don't like painting anything, not scuffed/sanded.JMO.

 

[ESP47]

Here are some pictures. I wish I would have known most of them came out blurry. They looked fine on the camera when I was taking them. Anyway for some reason the body has a lot of high spots. Most every panel has a high spot or two and some dings. You just can't see them because the car is white. I zoomed in on some of the major damage. I do have an extra passenger side door that I'm going to use since it's straight.

 

[MTmopars]

I just went through this. As others have stated, many body shops won't paint someone else's work. I just went through this myself. My father was a body man until about 25 yrs ago. He still did it on the side for a while but has isocyanate poisoning now. The paint on the car was in decent shape, so we hit it with 80 grit DA. Took the bad spots to metal and did necessary repairs. Primed and glazed the little spots we could find. Block sanded and re-primed, twice. From there we started looking for paint... Body shops didn't want to touch it. We ended up finding a very good painter and we wanted to let him do final sand so he could be sure the car was straight and ready for paint. He did find a few spots we missed or had accepted as good enough. In the end he had 80hrs of labor tied up into body work, 4 color paint, and cut and buff.